Mobile devices such as cellular telephones, smart phones, GPS systems, and cellular-enabled personal computers have become very common and very powerful. This combination of ubiquity and capability has created an ongoing demand for improved devices and unique applications. While applications currently exist for providing games, social networking, navigation assistance, locating of points of interest, location tracking, targeted advertising, and consumer and business-related services, even more capable, unique, and customizable applications are in demand.
A typical mobile device operates on a communication network that is provided by a mobile telephone operator. Such communication networks provide communication links and basic services such as time keeping and access to the public telephone network. A typically state-of-the-art mobile device, often referred to as a smartphone, may have built in features such as communication ports, touch screen displays, keyboards, orientation sensors, accelerometers, cameras, one or more timers, microphones, audio outputs, memory card readers, significant internal memory, and specialized software. Such mobile devices can provide a wide range of functionality such as telephone communications, texting, calendars, alarms, memo and note recording, GPS navigation, music (MP3) and video (MP4) playback, video calling, conference calling, movie playback, picture taking and sending, games, e-mails, audio and video downloading, internet access and browsing, short range communications such as Bluetooth™, mobile banking, instant messaging and the ever-popular specialized ringtones.
To maximize a customer's user experience, a particular application may need to determine the location and status of a mobile device, control a mobile device's functionality, and send and retrieve data from a particular mobile device. For example, some mobile devices can be configured such that the current physical location of the device as well as its current status, such as being on, off, in standby, or in use can be determined and then the functionality of the mobile device can be controlled to better serve the user. Such abilities enable applications that provide users with time, location, use, and functional specific services and capabilities, for example, advertising, games, social networking, navigation assistance, points of interest, and consumer and business-related services.
While mobile device users can and have benefited from location-specific services there are other services that are useful based on “user activities.” For example, some services are particularly useful when a user is performing a particular activity such as driving or when actually using a communication device. This ability has opened up the possibility of “user activity” based applications that perform activity-specific services and/or that can automatically configure a mobile device's functionality based on use.
However, the difficulty of actually controlling the wide range of different mobile devices on different networks, retrieving data from those mobile devices, and then determining locations, status, or user activities can become so complex that some otherwise worthwhile applications may simply not be cost effective to implement. However, with over 4 billion mobile devices in existence the demand for more, better, and specialized applications is extensive and growing.
One approach to addressing the complexity of providing users with applications that can take advantage of mobile devices having different features on different communication networks, as well as in different locations and in different operating statuses, is disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/217,093, entitled “System and Method for Enabling Control of Mobile Device Functional Components,” which was filed on Aug. 24, 2011. That patent application is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety as if fully disclosed herein.
While the teachings of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/217,093 are highly useful and beneficial, some applications may demand even more control of the mobile devices they run on than is provided by the teachings of that application.